Now Let's Talk About Populism for Real

Although historian Michael Kazin has rightly observed that both the left and right have used populist appeals against “elites” throughout the 20th century, there was, in fact, an actual Populist movement that took root during the infamous “gilded age” of the 1880s and 1890s.

In his new book, “The Populist Vision,” Charles Postel offers an original and riveting account of the Populist vision that jump-started 20th-century social reform movements and is still relevant to our contemporary American society.

We can easily imagine how Populists viewed their world. Our generation of Americans also feels disoriented by living in a shrinking world. In the late 19th century, writes Postel, “The traumas of technological innovation, expansion of corporate power, and commercial and cultural globalization” left many Americans reeling from the speed of change. “Corporations grew exponentionally amid traumatic spasms of global capitalist development. The rich amassed great fortunes, a prosperous section of the middle class grew more comfortable and hard times pressed on most everyone else.”

Out of this alienating and disorienting experience grew a Populism that previous historians have often simplified.  Some have viewed Populists as radical visionaries who dreamed of a utopian, egalitarian American society. Still others have characterized them as nostalgic, rural reactionaries who yearned for an Edenic, agrarian past.

Postel, however, offers a far more nuanced interpretation.  Armed with a wide array of sources, he convincingly argues that American Populism, for all its flaws and failures—it eventually failed to promote racial equality—was fundamentally a modern social movement that offered a “divergent” path to the creation of a modern capitalist society.

By excavating the ideas, lives and organizational activities of Populist activists, Postel demonstrates that the women and men in the Populist movement largely valued “business methods, education and technology” and embraced the ideas of modernity and progress. He vividly describes, for example, the rich intellectual debates that rippled through the movement. “Few political or social movements,” he writes, “brought so many men and women into lecture halls, classrooms, camp meetings and seminars or produced such an array of inexpensive literature.”

By scrutinizing their politics, Postel also reveals that the Populists, who decried the corruption of the traditional political parties, sought “a new type of politics that would deliver rationalized, nonpartisan and businesslike governances.”

For the Populists, argues Postel, the Post Office represented the ideal government agency. An elaborate bureaucracy, the Post Office simply delivered a necessary service without favoring special interests or interfering with the lives of its customers. This was “the Populist vision of an alternative capitalism in which private enterprise coalesced with both cooperative and state-based economies.” The Farmers Alliance, for example, “pursued the dramatic expansion of government regulation and control in the country’s economic life. This included demands for the public ownership of railroads and the telegraph. ... At stake was who should be included and who should wield shares of power—a conflict that all concerned understood as vital to the future of a modern America.”

Most historians of the Populist movement have focused largely on one region of the country, or exclusively on farmers or miners. Postel instead provides a far more expansive view of this national movement by including black and white farmers, wage earners, miners, railroad workers, rural women and bohemian urbanites. Taken together, those who participated in such a broad-based movement not only ranted against banks and farm policies, but also scrutinized the wages of workers, education, women’s rights, business, religion, race, science and technology.